


in every lost soul (the bones of a miracle)

by WhirlyBot



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, M/M, Slow Burn, demon hunter keith, half-demon lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 09:23:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11756838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhirlyBot/pseuds/WhirlyBot
Summary: Being a hunter, Keith finds, is much harder when you manage to befriend a half-demon with an unquenchable desire to kill.They'll work it out. Somehow.(Not Complete)





	in every lost soul (the bones of a miracle)

**Present Day**

Keith wakes up to a shadowy figure looming over him. 

This is nothing new. 

"Lance," he groans, rolling over and squeezing his eyes shut. "Go away. I'm trying to sleep."

"Uh, well, I would, but there's a bit of an issue."

Keith cracks one eye open reluctantly.

Lance is crouching at the end of his bed, wide-eyed and covered in blood.

"Holy–" Keith gasps, bolting upright. "Are you okay?" He grabs the knife from underneath his pillow, just in case Lance has been followed. 

Lance glances down at himself and snickers. "Oh, don't worry! It's not mine."

" _What._ " Keith pinches the bridge of my nose. "Why were you out hunting this early?"

"I felt like it." Lance drums his nails against the bedposts. "Wanna help me hide a body?" He says it the way one might say _want to go on a date with me?_ Nervousness tinged with excitement. 

But, Keith acquiesces, this probably _is_ Lance's idea of a date. Not that he'd know, of course. He hasn't fantasized about dating Lance. Never.

"Is it a humanoid?" Keith hopes that it isn't. He doesn't much feel like dragging around a dead person at two in the morning.

Lance snorts. "Of course not. I might have a lot of flaws, but they don't include stupidity. I don't hunt things as big as myself alone. It's a goblin."

Keith kind of wants to punch his partner. "You can't get rid of it yourself? Those things weigh forty pounds at the most."

"It _smells_ ," Lance whines. "Come on, you know my nose is more sensitive to otherworldly scents."

"If I don't get up, are you going to just stare at me all night?" 

"I think you already know the answer to that."

Lance looks extremely pleased with himself as Keith gives a long, strangled sigh and rolls out from under the covers.

"Alright, buddy." Keith pats Lance's shoulder and wants to die immediately, because his hand has landed in a particularly large patch of blood. "Let's go wipe up some goblin remains."

—

"Lance," Keith says evenly.

"Yeah?" Lance's reply is distracted. The half-demon is hunched over, vigorously scrubbing at the ground.

"When I said "wipe up some goblin", it wasn't a literal statement." Keith nudges what he suspects was once an arm with his foot.

"So maybe I got a little carried away," Lance admits.

Keith coughs. "Just a little." He takes a step to the left, and something squelches beneath his shoe.

"Hey, there's really no reason for you to be so grossed out. You're not the one who's going to be picking goblin viscera out of his teeth for the next month." Lance clacks his fangs with obvious distaste.

"Are you sure you aren't part vampire?" Keith asks dryly.

"Oh, hell, don't ever compare me to a bloodsucker again, please." Lance shudders. "Fangs are good for a killing bite."

"With a little evisceration beforehand, of course," Keith drawls.

Lance's eyes flash. "Of course," he repeats.

Keith gags as he picks up what might have been an eye, but could just as easily have been a toe. 

"Don't be a baby, Keith. You see dead bodies everyday." Lance is scraping bone bits into one of the trash bags they've brought along. 

"Yeah," Keith says, "bodies. This isn't a body. This is just mash."

Lance ties his bag shut. "I'm done. How about you?"

Keith plops one last handful of red goop into his own trash bag. "Yep."

"Great! I can take these back to the freezer real quick and put it with the rest. Wanna grab a bite when I get back?"

Keith considers this. They've just finished mopping up the insides of a goblin, and Lance is feeling hungry.

Well.

He _did_ skip dinner the night before.

"Okay," Keith agrees. "I could eat."

"Awesome." Lance picks up the bags with one arm, gives Keith a cheeky little salute, and vanishes in a cloud of blueish-grey smoke.

—

Denny's is the go-to restaurant for any four in the morning meals, especially when you're celebrating the successful completion of daring and/or illegal activities.

Every decent demon hunter knows this.

Lance is happily munching away at his pancakes. When he'd ordered them, the waitress had looked at him with the eyes of someone who had screamed into the void and heard it scream back, but went to make them anyway.

Keith picks at his eggs and tries not to think about how those pearly incisors had been ripping through flesh just hours before. 

"Hey, Lance?"

Lance looks up, mouth full. "Mhm?"

"Tomorrow's our off day, remember?" They'd established Sunday as their break day once they'd figured out that Lance's power was significantly weakened from dawn to dusk. Keith, of course, had teased him about it endlessly. 

Lance swallows. "Yeah, what about it?"

Keith shrugs. "I don't know, I thought we could do something fun. Go somewhere, you know?" He can't remember the last time he left this city. Living in a demon-infested area when you're a hunter makes it hard to leave. Or live, for that matter. 

Lance perks up. "Sure, man! I mean, we can't go too far, but I'm so down for a nice, not-supernatural adventure."

And there's the catch. Demons are bound to their place of origin. Whether summoned or born, they couldn't travel more than sixty miles in any direction. 

"Don't worry about it." Keith waves a hand. "There's a historic little town fifty minutes or so from here. Might be a stretch, but you should be good in most parts of it. We can visit an old friend of mine."

"Cool." Lance has finished his pancakes. "Are they, you know..."

"A demon hunter? Nah. Shiro's a firefighter. He's like an older brother to me, really. We've kept in touch, but I haven't visited since I met you." Keith doesn't mean for it to sound accusatory, but it does anyway.

Lance doesn't flinch, but Keith knows him well enough to recognize the tells. A twitching of the ring finger, a minuscule lowering of the head.

"I didn't mean it like that," Keith begins awkwardly, not used to apologizing. 

As if a switch has been flipped, Lance is back to his usual carefree self. "I know that! So, when are we leaving?"

"Well, I'm not getting back to sleep, so why don't you help me pack the car after we finish up?"

"Sounds like a plan."

—

**Two Years, One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Days Ago**

"There's been a string of killings down near the schoolyard," Keith's informant tells him. "Nothing big so far. Couple of goblins, and no one's gonna miss those bastards."

"So what's our suspect?" Keith asks. "New hunter?" 

The informant shakes his head, barely visible in the fading light of the alleyway. "No. If you'd seen the corpses... it ain't human. Not by a long shot. I'm guessing wendigo, but it's mighty strange for them to not eat their prey. This is an anomaly. Could be werewolf, or vamp. We don't know."

Keith's blood runs cold. "You think it's building up to something bigger? The kids?"

"I hope to all the gods it's not. But we can't afford to take chances. You in?"

"Of course," Keith says. "How does a week from now sound? Some nice bait and an all-night stakeout."

The informant grins. "Don't be late."

The stakeout never happens. Keith meets his informant only two days later, in a different alley. 

"I thought we were gonna take this thing on together," Keith grumbles. He and the informant aren't friends, certainly. Hell, he doesn't even know the other man's name. But there's an unspoken pact between hunters.

"It killed a bugbear," the informant hisses. "Absolutely decimated the body. Do you know how much work it took to convince people that some wildcat had attacked a horse?" He's brought along a medium sized iron box, and it sits ominously between them. "I had to take action."

"Is that its head?" Keith gestures to the box.

"No," the informant sighs, crouching down. "But at least we know what it is."

He flips the latch, and the top of the box springs open to reveal a human arm.

Keith inhales sharply. "Demon."

"Half," the informant corrects. "Young, by the looks of it. Medium dark skin, blue eyes, brown hair. Tall. Male. Your age. He's a fast little bastard. Only got his arm before he vanished. Been a while since I've seen one that can teleport."

Keith knows what this means. In order to retain power, demons have to kill. The soul energy fuels them. But a half-demon can survive on human sustenance alone. They kill for the sheer unholy delight of it.

"I'm going to find that thing," the informant says grimly. "And I'm going to rip his head off. It's my fight now."

"Be careful," Keith reminds.

The informant scoffs. "I always am."

—

A week later, the informant is dead.

And Keith goes hunting.

**Author's Note:**

> drop a comment and kudos if you enjoyed! ;)


End file.
